Author's Intent Quotes

I couldn't have known 'Crank' was going to be published, let alone become a big hit. That book was very personal for me: I had to tell the story for myself.

I talked to George Lucas once, not about Star Wars. Everyone wants to talk to him about Star Wars, and I didn't want to be one of those people. In person - at least on this occasion - he wasn't effervescent and giddy, as the Star Wars movies are. He's more focused.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

I've only written one science-fiction book: 'Fahrenheit 451.' That book is a book based on real facts and my hatred of people who destroy books.

People think children's books are about teddy bears and little flowers. I realize people sometimes don't know what to do with my books because they say, 'Is it a children's book, and what age group?'

If people read 'Tomorrow' and feel that it is offering them some view of my own household, they would be very, very wrong.

My stories have a deep spiritual core because I have a deep desire to understand things of the spirit, but yet I don't think I've written these stories from any kind of specific religious agenda because I don't think that would work.

I've never read a script that I've loved equally and differently to the book.

I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.

When you write fiction, you have an ideal reader in your mind who's sort of you but smarter.

When a translation is very good, it is fascinating to see how the book changes and yet stays the same. I think 'Out Stealing Horses' sounds more American for Americans than it does in Norway, and still, it is all there, everything that I wrote. It's amazing.

I write books to find out about things.

A book must have moral purpose to be any good. Why, I don't know.

Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.

There's a market for fiction based on financial services. People wanted me to write stories based on this sector. There's a gap in the market, and I'm trying to fill it.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer.

the autobiography is at one and the same time a single element in the series of the writer's created works and an interpretation of the whole series.

I did not intend for there to be an incisive historical lesson in 'North and South.' Basically, it's just a good, juicy story.

In my lifetime I was to write only one book, this would be the one. Just as the past Lingers in the present, all my writings after night, including those that deal with biblical, Talmudic, or Hasidic themes, profoundly bear it's stamp, and cannot be understood if one has not read this very first of my works. Why did I write it? Did I write it so as not to go mad or, on the contrary, to go mad in order to understand the nature of the madness, the immense, terrifying madness that had erupted in history and in the conscience of mankind?

There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'

This is what I have discovered - and it has been a gift in itself - that books live over and over again in different people's minds. That I might mean one thing as I write, but a reader's experiences will take it somewhere else. That is like a conversation, I think. It is a true connecting up.

My job as an author - at least the way I think of it - is to make a story that is coded and puzzling enough to entice conversation and interpretation, but also to do the opposite: to make some things clear so that it is meaningful in some way, not just a random assemblage of ideas.

Til 1983, I wrote primarily for other psychologists and expected that they would be the principal audience for my book.

I wasn't happy with Tagore's own translations in English. Maybe he was, but I wasn't, so I took it upon myself to do it.

But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.